Although Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian had known each other since primary school, Turin Brakes’ real birth was with the release of ‘The Door’ ep; originally conceived as a score for a film while Olly was doing his film degree at St Martin’s. Brighton’s Anvil Records heard the music and loved it, and ‘The Door’ ep was released in summer 1999. The film never got made.
It was due to their initial lack of interest in recording contracts that Turin Brakes had been left to develop and mature at their own pace, then at the beginning of 2000 they signed with Source. They spent most of the first half of the year writing and recording, emerging only to play a few select live shows, until the release of their second ep, ‘The State of Things’, in August. That month they also played their first ever gigs with a full band at the Reading and Leeds festivals. The ‘Fight or Flight’ ep came in October.
By the end of the year, Jockey Slut had proclaimed them “so good it hurts”, Skint head honcho Damian Harris, aka Midfield General, reckoned they could probably make him cry just by singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and the NME had practically ordered its readers to listen to them: “Turin Brakes inhabit a space which is entirely their own, fully-formed and brutally emotive... give them the devotion they deserve.” At the beginning of 2001, Turin Brakes were poised on the brink of something very, very special.
February saw a reworked version of ‘The Door’ released as a single, accompanied by a compelling and unsettling video shot in bleakly beautiful Dungeness. Turin Brakes’ self-produced debut album, ‘The Optimist LP’, arrived in March and was instantly hailed as a classic in all quarters, with people falling over themselves to proclaim it “a beautiful, red-blooded, uplifting collection of songs, without a phoney lyric or hackneyed chord sequence in sight” (Time Out) and “like discovering Nick Drake’s ‘Five Leaves Left’ or REM’s ‘Murmur’, that same sense of a talent so fully-formed, even from the start, that is seems strange that the music hasn’t always been there” (NME). Now with a Top 40 album, they played their first ever headline tour of the UK, then released ‘Underdog (Save Me)’ at the end of April. ‘Underdog...’ propelled them once more into the top 40 and also to their debut appearance on Top of the Pops. Another single, ‘Mind Over Money’, was released at the end of July. It charted at 31, they again played TOTP and at the end of the month, in the very same week that Turin Brakes sold out the London Astoria, ‘The Optimist LP’ was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. They had a busy summer, playing the Witnness, Glasgow on the Green and V2001 festivals, and were nominated for Best New Band at both the Q Awards and the Brits. It seemed nothing could stop them: Turin Brakes finished the year with another single, ‘Emergency 72’, and a major headline tour of the UK culminating in two euphoric sold-out nights at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. ‘The Optimist LP’ has since gone gold twice over (200,000 copies).
September 2002, and Turin Brakes are preparing to return. They played triumphant sets at V2002, with crowds ecstatic to have them back after what felt like such a long time (nine months). The first single from the new album, ‘Ether Song’ (planned for February 2003 release), will be ‘Long Distance’, out on October 21st, and there will be an acoustic tour of selected theatres around the UK in September, featuring just Olly and Gale plus Texan keyboardist Dave Palmer, who also plays on the new album.
‘Ether Song’ was recorded over three weeks in Los Angeles in early summer 2002 with Beck/Air/Supergrass producer Tony Hoffer. Going to California and working with a big-name producer may seem at odds with the popular perception of Turin Brakes, but athough the importance of lyric and simplicity of production on ‘The Optimist LP’ had brought them success and critical acclaim, they wanted to break away from the “new acoustic” noose and make something more direct, more upfront sonically. They turned their back on their previous restraint, and the result is an album that is at once melancholy and euphoric; nostalgic and visionary; grand and intensely personal.
